Unusual 1050 jam

[Braxton1]

Had a weird jam last night in the 1050. Everything was just humming along, then the press stopped right at the end of the upstroke. I was thinking, "There's a lot of stuff happening right at this point.", so I checked the primer slide. It was free and clear. I tried to rotate the shellplate by hand. No Go. I checked the casefeeder slide. It had pushed the new case fully in, so that wasn't the issue. I finally decided to unload the shellplate. Here's what I found:

I had never seen such, but it jammed the shellplate so hard that it wouldn't turn at all.

Edited August 14, 2012 by Braxton1

[Torogi]

is this by station 2, decap/resize?

I just removed the shellplate twice over the weekend. not as easy as 2 pins. oh yeah, talk about tipped over toolhead with the powder reservoir full of powder. not fun

[Braxton1]

Yep, this was jammed into Station 2.

[Canuck223]

This isn't uncommon. I don't know the cause, but for whatever reason the primer itself comes apart. Often the whole top of the primer seperates and the anvil comes out, but left in the primer pocket is a tube.

On other presses, you discover the issue when you try to mash a primer into the obstructed pocket.

On the 1050, you tend to clue in something is wrong when you find a sudden increase in pressure at the bottom of the stroke.

In most cases, you won't have been able to reach the normal bottom of the stroke, so the case currently at the priming station will have a high primer.

[Intel6]

This is what is called a "ringer" because usually the hanging chad thing is knocked completely off and all you have left is the left over ring made up of just the sides of the primer cup.

I worked in a commercial reloading shop in college and we saw this often enough with the amount of brass we went through. We ran our brass through a case checker and this was one of the things it checked for.

There are a few different views on why this happens but I believe it has to do with moisture getting in the pocket. What I think happens is the moisture mixes with the primer ash and makes a "glue" that makes the close fitting sides of the primer cup sides and the sides of the primer pocket. The other possibility is the minerals in the water left over when it dries doing the same thing.

The reason I think it has to do with moisture is because at the reloading comapny I worked for we loaded the pratice rounds (.38 special) for LAPD which amounted to 700,000 rounds a month. We would take the loaded ammo down there and bring the brass back in short galvanized trash cans that they kept on the range and dumped the brass in. We would run the brass through a sorter to get rid of any junk or other caliber's of brass and then run them through our cement mixer case polishers. After that the brass would be run through the case checker that checks for cracks, ringers, etc... One day I started a new can worth of brass on the case checker and immediatly started getting almost every case kicked out for being a ringer? We determined that the can of brass had been left out in the rain which supports my theory of mositure having to do with ringers. When we started using another can of brass the ringers stopped so we set that can aside so we didn't slow down our optempo.

Neal in AZ

Edited August 14, 2012 by Intel6

[Tom Freeman]

The times I have run into that with 223 brass it has always been that the brass had got wet. The primer seems to corrode in place and the decap pin pops off the top of the cup of the top half of the cup.